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Harry writes "I'm using Pastebud, the new third-party copy-and-paste solution for the iPhone. It's extremely clever, using a Web-based clipboard to get around the fact that Apple doesn't provide one on the phone. Unfortunately, it seems to be giving users access to e-mails that other Pastebud users send to their clipboards. This has happened to me repeatedly and is being reported by other users in Pastebud's Get Satisfaction support forum. Pastebud is operational and still doing this as I write, even though a message at Get Satisfaction says they're working on the problem."

...well you *ARE* trusting a small, third party entity with your data on the internet. Can you really expect things that are not on storage you monitor yourself to be secure? Furthermore, why can't it just store your clipboard through local storage? Does it really have to put it up online? Do Apple's apps have no way to store and retrieve local data?

Apple really should have this feature built in, but you shouldn't be surprised when your workaround that involves dumping your unencrypted data on a server somewhere has security issues.

Ya, if I read this correctly, a quick scan of TFA (I know, not supposed to do that here) seems to indicate this is a *Pastebud problem, not an iPhone problem.
Of course, if the iPhone does not have cut'n'paste, that's entirely another problem.

Furthermore, why can't it just store your clipboard through local storage? Does it really have to put it up online?

You're looking for OpenClip [openclip.org]. It's basically an open spec (well, as open as it can get under Apple's terms) for clipboards on the iPhone, and is supported by several applications. MagicPad is the notepad replacement that is written by the same folks.

Do Apple's apps have no way to store and retrieve local data?

iPhone applications have read-only access to the data of other applications. This prevents the creation of a single app that acts as a clipboard, since you can't (yet) have background apps.

What OpenClip does is specify a standard location in each app for clipb

(NOTE: Jed Schmidt of Pastebud fixed the problem I discuss in this post yesterday night after I notified him about it. It affected only users-such as me-who misconfigured the service. Scroll down for details...)

Harry,

I've updated this issue over at Get Satisfaction[1], but let me just summarize what exactly was going wrong: you were inadvertently forwarding your emails not to your secret pastebud address, but to the address set as the from address for these emails, which was noreply@pastebud.com.

This happened to other folks too; instead of sending email to secret-random-string@pastebud.com, they were sending to noreply@pastebud.com. And everyone who was doing this ended up sharing the same clipboard.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we've fixed it, and the changed will be live by the morning. You can find more details about the issue here[1].

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention, and let me know if there's anything else you need clarification on.

Seems like every few months you hear yet another story about something bad happening because people are replying to or otherwise using a 'noreply' email address. Here's a clue - if you ever send emails to anyone from a 'noreply' address (or some other similar account name), you better make damn sure your servers are configured to not do something bad or stupid when unobservant users actually do reply to it.

I will give them credit for this: *at least* it was noreply at their own domain. Too often, when you hear about this sort of thing, it's because a company did something like sending an email with a return address of 'noreply@donotreply.com' or something like that (where the domain is not their domain, and is a string which could potentially be registered by someone). I remember reading (ok, just found the story [washingtonpost.com] again) about a guy who had registered the domain 'donotreply.com' for yucks, and started getting all sorts of stuff like replies from Capital One bank customers, when Capital One sent some emails with the donotreply.com as the domain. (Sadly, the website www.donotreply.com where the guy used to blog about all the emails seems to be down now; wonder what happened to it - probably sunk by a lawsuit, or maybe the guy finally got bored of spending his free time reading thousands of emails).

Donotreply.com was one of the domains available for Portal of Evil's evilemail service... and "some guy" in this case is Chet Faliszek, who's actually with Valve these days. Ever hear of a little game called Portal?

When I first heard of this trick, I thought it was pretty damn clever. But the way I'd imagined it from the headline was that it would use the mailto: pseudo-protocol to paste to Mail, and would use HTML5 client-side database [webkit.org] or a cookie of some sort to store it in the browser. My idea was basically three bookmarklets:

Copy: Stores selected text in client-side database or cookie

Paste: Pastes into text field in browser

Paste to Mail: Opens a URL to mailto:replace@this.com?body=$clipboardContents

Obviously this wouldn't work for copying from Mail to Safari, but I was kind of confused as to when that would come in handy anyway. The trade-off for security would be worth it, and if you really wanted to, you could still do a trip to a server for Mail-to-Safari copying.

I haven't delved into the bookmarklets yet, so maybe it's not possible for some reason, but does anyone know why they would choose to have it make a trip to the server when it seems like it could be pretty easily avoided?

My God. How fucking horrible are -any- of these solutions?!? This one, a local one, whatever. They're all fucking horrible! All because The Steve says cut-n-paste is not for a touch screen phone. Ye gods. But apparently this is acceptable to the RDF'ed masses. I've read countless blog posts justifying the 'no cut and paste' as being a good idea, anything to require no admission of the fact that it's an ugly stupid and inexcusable UI flaw.

I have a hunch that Steve is looking for something a lot better than text copy-paste. Copy-paste done correctly is more complicated than you think it is.

If I copy text, does it copy attributes? Does bold text retains its boldness? Etc.

What happens when I want to copy an email address from the address book? Am I limited to copying read-only text or read-write text? Why can't I copy a whole address book entry? What happens when I paste the address book entry?

Yes, on OS X, you would use the NSPasteBoard [apple.com] class to interact with the system-wide clipboard. The only thing stopping Apple from implementing NSPasteBoard in the iPhone SDK appears to be the question of how to implement it best in the UI. The system of NSPasteBoard filters handles all the gritty details of converting data between different formats; a given pasteboard can hold data in a specific format (or even multiple formats at once), and the client can invoke a filter to read the data from the PB using

Windows Mobile touchphones go with the plan of poking the text itself for a short time (longer than a "click" poke) and popping up a context menu. I think a variant of that could work, though I'd prefer instead of a context menu some kind of directional overlay so you could flick your finger to one side or the other afterward for copy or paste.

Generally I think radial menus and similar make a lot more sense with touch screens than they ever did with the mouse, and are due for a resurgence.

That one is easy...Because that is what Microsoft does. They push out half completed bullshit products on their base and then say "well it will probably work right by the time SP2 comes along".

Do it right the first time and don't put it out there until it is done right. Otherwise you fuck up your reputation. It is a lot harder to get the word out of "Hey, iPhone cut and paste is new and improved and actually works like it should now!" rather than "New iPhone 3.0! Now with Cut and Paste!". Most users are

If you had used an iPhone or iPod touch very much, you would have seen that it has a magnifying glass feature which is used to select your edit point when modifying a block of text. It works quite well, too. It seems to me like the magnifying glass would be a great way to mark your starting and ending selection points.

I have and that idea gives me nightmares. I dread screwing up enough that I need to use it. Nothing wrong with it, just a pain to get it in place. I think that cut and paste like that would often be far more trouble than it's worth.

Except your argument is mixed. Pushing out an OS without cut & paste is just as much a "half completed bullshit product" as pushing out cut & paste which is text-only.

Which isn't to say that it's the wrong choice, necessarily. A knowledgeable user would have more functionality with text-only, but most of iPhone's customers aren't experts, we know. The argument needs to go deeper into why the boundary is where it is, because from the complaints about the lack of copy paste, we know that the iPhon

Well arguably yes. My point is that half assed features will cause worse outcomes than missing features. It is better to add new (complete) functionality than patching it together as you go. Aside from the reputation issues, what if you have to alter how it works to get it done. Now you have to deal with that whole retrain your users crap. (Fuck you Microsoft and your constant total interface redesigns! The first time you set up a wireless connection in Vista you may need antipsychotic meds afterwards

I have a hunch that Steve is looking for something a lot better than text copy-paste.

So? I'm sure that he- along with lots of other companies- is, but that's no excuse for leaving the facility out altogether until something better comes along!

Well, the excuse is that others have done exactly that, and thus Windows (and a lot of other stuff) is full of interface quirks that are still in because people got so used to them they reject the better fix. Which (at least in the Windows case) results in some apps supporting only the old, some only the new, and some being forced to support both. Heck, apps supporting just one method will often use the other for something completely else. Yeah, a fine solution that is.

Sorry, but I'm not buying that justification. Are you saying that no cut and paste is better than a flawed implementation, even if it's clear that Apple had- and have- nothing better in the pipeline?

The iPhone has been out for 18 months now. In that time, there's been no official cut and paste facility, let alone an improved version! The simple truth is that Apple likely launched the cut-and-pasteless iPhone with nothing better planned for the forseeable future. (If they'd anything that was well-developed

Not sure where you've read the countless defenses of lack-of-cut-and-paste, but Apple doesn't seem to agree. It's on their list; other things were higher on their list. I myself don't care about Exchange-server compatibility, and would MUCH rather have cut-and-paste. I'm sure others have their own personally-improved priority lists.

I think Apple's done pretty well for an OS that's only 18 months out of the gate. Anything that new is bound to have some of what I call "unconscionably absent" features. I'

I have an iPhone, and I use it regularly. There have been exactly two times when I wished that I had copy/paste. So no, I don't see what the big deal is. I don't think that lack of copy/paste was a good design decision--in fact, I'm sure that the phone would be better with it. But I don't think that it's a killer feature. I certainly don't think that the addition of copy/paste will make iPhone haters suddenly embrace the device--they'll just find something else to complain about.

This should be reason enough for Apple to finally implement their own cut-and-paste functionality. Even if they aren't making the apps/bookmarklets that have these security breaches, the bad PR in general will drag them through the mud.

No wait... in ALL this time, Apple still hasn't provided this basic functionality?

I wrote off the iPhone when I learned of the battery problem and haven't paid much attention to it since then. But one thing I expected to see resolved was the clipboard deficiency. I know some of my users were bouncing around happy when an update fixed some sync problem they were having and somehow among those fixes, I thought the clipboard feature was added, but I guess I was wrong.

One thing I find ironic about iPhone is that Apple has somehow managed to restrict the convenience and basic functionality right out of the machine. I won't deny iPhone's extremely enthusiastic fanbase. It is rather incredible. But the coolest thing one user had to show was the zippo lighter. Yes, it looks and acts like a zippo lighter and serves no function at all. (Now when it lights a virtual cigarette on another iPhone, I will be impressed!) But I find it more than a little amazing that Copy and Paste are still not present.

I think, perhaps, I understand why though. Apple may have created a security model that effectively prevents that from working -- even for themselves -- ever. If all apps, as I have read here, are chrooted to themselves and essentially shares nothing with the OS (which is somewhat hard to imagine...sharing nothing with the OS... how about some API code?) then it would seem that while security holes are effectively blocked forever, so too is basic functionality. Are iPhone apps not allowed to talk to a storage device that other iPhone apps are also allowed to talk to? It sounds like "no" since this paste program uses the inter-web to share data between apps. And what? This data isn't encrypted for individual users?

Apple couldn't decide if the iPhone was supposed to be a phone or a computer, and in the end, it does neither particularly well.

I think they did get a lot right tho in terms of user interface and design. I'd also like to develop for the platform. I'll be keeping my eyes on the iPhone to see if they get these failing eliminated in some future firmware release.

You could be right about why. To be honest, I've never missed this functionality - the way I use the phone doesn't ever require copy paste. However while we're guessing, I'm guessing the reason it is missing is they couldn't develop a UI to copy/paste that was intuitive enough. How _do_ you copy/paste without a menu, some sort of special 'snip' gesture?

Personally the biggest missing functionality for me is the inability to remember passwords/secure notes and requiring me to type them in on every visit. T

how about if i press for say 2 seconds at the start of where i want to copy i get a draggable highlight? then i tap the highlighted text after dragging to the end point and it copies. at the other end of the process, how about i hold down for 3 seconds to paste?

seriously, for all the things my iPhone does, i'm still amazed it DOESN'T do cut and paste. Coming from a blackberry, which does cut and paste, i probably notice the lack of it more. it's easy for people